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The professionals of the web design company will surely benefit from following the usual guidelines in web designing and though some may think that they have earned enough expertise on that certain field, there are some things that can never be disregarded when aiming for an expertly designed website.

• Web content that has grammatical and spelling errors should never find its place on a website who wants to established a credible reputation.

• It is important to design a website that would be compatible on different browsers. There are many browsers being used by different users and it would be totally useless to have the best website if it cannot run on most browsers.

• Always optimize your photos before posting it onto your site. Most web visitors are very conscious of the time that they spend on certain websites and they would surely leave a site that keeps them hanging for so long.

• The 3-click rule should be understood by web developers. If a web visitor can’t achieve what they need after 3 clicks on the mouse they would find no reason to linger on it so it would definitely be necessary to make sure that there are no discrepancies within your links.

A good web design merely deals with adequate planning. It may only need a common sense and right judgment to determine the things that would surely work best for your site and for sure if you’ll carefully take note of these important things, the task of designing a perfectly made website will never be hard to accomplish.

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A frequent question that arises amongst web designers is how much text should be placed on a web page. However many web designers use decisions based on subjective feelings rather than basing their decisions on quantitative research.

Page density refers to the proportion of a web page that is occupied by text and graphics whilst white space is the portion of the page where nothing is displayed. The percentage of page white space and the percentage of the page density will amount to 100%.

Long before viewing hypertext pages on the web researchers conducted studies to investigate the relationship between the amount of information contained on a page and the amount of time that it took for a user to find an item as part of a predefined task. Not surprisingly and in accordance with what many would intuitively think they found that the more information that was placed on a screen then the longer it took to complete the task.

In light of this research many authors have suggested guidelines on the amount of information that should be presented to users at any one time. Some authors have issued guidelines stating that screen densities of 25% shouldn’t be exceeded at one end of the scale and 60% at the other. However one aspect these items didn’t cover which the web designer or web developer should be aware (but frequently aren’t) is that other components of a web page have a significant effect on a web users interaction with a website and consequently the effectiveness of the site other than just the page density.

Furthermore, the main question for a web designer who has a fixed amount of information to present on a webpage is what page density to use as that will directly affect the number of pages required by the site.

One study tried to address this question by presenting a fixed amount of information with different numbers of pages. There were a large number of low density pages, a medium number of average density pages and a low number of high density pages. Other factors such as the need to scroll the screens of information were removed from the study.

What the result of this investigation found and should be remembered by web designers at all times is that performance was significantly faster on the low number of high density pages, with the performance being worst on the high number of low density pages. Another interesting attribute of this investigation was that there was little difference between novice and experienced users, high density pages always won.

These results suggest, to a certain extent, that the best approach for web design is that lots of information should be placed on a webpage as densely as possible without risking the loss of user accuracy or satisfaction. This will also result in a lower number of web pages which a user will have to navigate through. Some people may take this to the apparent logical conclusion that everything should be placed on one page. However, to keep the web designer on his toes, other factors come into play, such as the need to scroll and how the information is presented on page, let alone the time to load individual pages.

A further study which supports high page densities which involved users searching for information on commercial websites found that the more white space, the less successfully people found information. The authors however speculated that although this aided readers who were looking for specific information, it may not be helpful to people skimming pages, who will be most successful when they can skim the most material the most quickly.

However before the web designer or web developer set out to create the ultimate web design there are other design tricks that can increase the effectiveness of a web site. There are four items that should be remembered:

Abbreviations. By using abbreviations which the users will be familiar with rather than the full text the density of information that be conveyed in a limited number of words is dramatically increased.

Reduce unnecessary detail. Don’t get carried away with superfluous detail. Winston Churchill once apologised for writing a long letter to someone as he didn’t have time to write a concise letter. Spend time by rigorously reducing the amount of unnecessary text.

Familiar format and presentation. By presenting information to users in a familiar way so that they don’t have to think increases the speed and accuracy. Examples of this would be presenting dates in d/m/y format for Europe and m/d/y for the US. Other items would include postcodes (zip codes), thousands separators and telephone numbers (don’t use full international numbers if the users will be from the same locality).

Tabulate. If information can be presented in table form then the web design should reflect that. Tables have the advantage of allowing the use of descriptive column and row headings that exquisitely eliminate the need to keep repeating the same label to data elements. The result being the same amount of information with reduced text.

By being aware of these web design guidelines it is possible to create a web site that will allow users to effectively interact and leave a lasting good impression of your hard work.

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Whether you like it or not, internet has become a commodity in life. And because of this trend, web hosting providers have pop up like mushroom after downpour offering their service. Everyone is claiming to have the best web hosting service in the world. Almost everybody is overselling on the service in order to stand up as the leaders. Therefore as consumers like us, it is utmost importance to know to differentiate the good hosting providers and the bad one. Here is a list of criteria you might take in consideration in picking web hosting.

Performance

A good web hosting providers always has a good performance. Does not matter whether the hosting is a famous hosting or a hosting company in the backyard, hosting performance should always be your first concern. After all unlimited storage will be meaningless if you get an unstable hosting with 4 days down in 1 week. To compare the web hosting performance is easy. Check out hosting review site and see what others have to say about it. Some review site even pay to monitor the hosting uptime where you can justify the performance of the hosting providers using the review site data.

Location

Location of the web hosting providers in fact does not reflect the quality of web hosting. Location should be one of the considerations is because you should put your targeted users as first priority. If your visitors are from local and you host your website else where, it will somehow affect the loading speed of the website. However, this issue has been resolved bit by bit by the fast growing telecommunication technology. Once you have fast speed internet connections the location can be eliminated from the list. But no matter how, pre caution is always recommended.

Hosting Features

Web hosting features should be on of your main concerns because these are what you get with the money you pay. Hosting features inclusive of many aspect and the most popular aspects is the storage space. Storage space determines how many files and data you can store in your web hosting. If you get big size storage, you can build more features and make your idea a realistic easier; if you get small size storage, you will be sometime limited. The second most popular aspect in web hosting is bandwidth. Bandwidth is the resources pulled out from the server computer when your users request files and data from your website. Therefore the bigger the bandwidth is, the more simultaneous requests can be handled by the server computer. What happens when the bandwidth being consumed is more than as designated is your website will go down as a result of congestion. Therefore it is important to have bigger bandwidth to cater for spike of traffic. These 2 aspects can be easily justified on web hosting review website.

The amount of allowed domain hosted should be another aspect as well. We call the extra domains as add on domains. Some hosting companies only allow 1 domain name per hosting account and some allow unlimited add on domains. Apparently enough if the hosting company allows only 1 domain, you can only host 1 website in that particular hosting regardless of how big is the storage of hosting. In another hand, you can host unlimited website with unlimited add on domains. Of cause the latter case will not be useful if the hosting storage space is an issue. Therefore add on domains should work closely with the bandwidth and storage space.

Scripts & Compatibility

Most of the hosting plans come with free scripts. Check what the free scripts are and how you can utilize from them. In fact those scripts are only useful for certain website. If there is no scripts that helps you, scripting is not an extra point for that particular hosting providers. For example if you are building a hobbyist website sharing your thoughts and knowledge, you will not find CubeCart shopping cart useful. But if you are building a business blog, blogging software like WordPress in the scripts library will definitely help.

If you are a web builder, I am sure you understand the importance of the software compatibility of web hosting. This is because with more compatibility you get more flexibility in using your favorite software and programming language. Check whether the hosting provider supports the programming language you use or not. For usual case major web developing software like Dreamweaver and Frontpage are supported.

These 4 points will be the most critical consideration points you should take note of. Of cause there are other important points like customer support and pricing but I believe if a web hosting can handle the above mentioned criteria they will not have any problems taking care of other important points My final thought is that in choosing a good web hosting, you should always know what you need and what is your end result. If you already knew that the website you build will bring a lot of traffics and ton of income, why not just plan properly and get the site built on a quality web hosting. I am sure with that it will save you a lot of headache later on.

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